Monday, August 3, 2015

Penningroth to UC Berkeley

To many readers, this is old news, but I don't think we've officially announced it yet. Dylan Penningroth, formerly of Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation, has joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he will split time between the Law School's Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) program and the History Department. Here's an excerpt from the Law School's announcement:

“At Berkeley, there’s a constel­lation of faculty coming together in
my fields of interest,” he said. “When you look at what the uni­versity
offers in terms of legal history, and more specifically in American and
British legal his­tory related to race, that’s hard to beat.”

In addition to his duties at Northwestern, Penningroth has been a
research professor at the American Bar Foundation since 2007. There, he
coordinated weekly seminars and other pro­gramming while sharing ideas
with other socio-legal experts.

“That experience opened my eyes to what you can do when examining law
and legal founda­tions with the tools of a histo­rian,” he said. “It
brought me into this law school universe.”

His first book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, won
the Organization of American Historians’ Avery Craven Prize.
Penningroth’s many other hon­ors include a prestigious MacArthur
Foundation fellowship.

Currently, he is working on a study of African Americans’ encounters
with law from the Civil War to the civil rights movement—which examines
the practical meaning of legal rights for black life.